There are three glorious kings at the genesis of the three great monotheistic religions:
King David, the Judean Emperor in the 10th century BC. According to James Kugel the recording of the key passages in Torah and the most important Judaic formulations point to the 10th century BC.
King Constantine the Great, the Roman Emperor in the 3rd century AD. Constantine legalized Christianity in the Empire and introduced it as a state religion.
King Muhammad, the Prophet of the Arabian Peninsula and the future Caliphate, 5th century AD. During that time (or after) was the recording of the Qur’an and the creation of the creed.
The three kings had much in common. Foremost each emperor unified the dispersed tribes and the remote provinces into a state ruled by the absolutist power, a one monarch (monarcha – one ruler):
King David attacked and captured Jerusalem and made it his capital, the City of David. He unified or conquered the Northern tribes of Israel, creating an empire that lasted till the death of his son Solomon. Still the new Temple and the ritual became etched in the imagination for the next three thousand years.
King Constantine attacked and captured Byzantium, renamed it Constantinople and made it the capital of the unified Roman Empire. The period immediately preceeding Constantine’s rule is known as Tetrarchy when the vast territory of the Roman Empire was split into four separately governed provinces. Constantine unified the empire by force and intrigue and moved the capital from Rome. Allegedly before one of his victorious battles he branded his soldiers with a cross and hence became a believer.
King Muhammad attacked and captured Mecca and Medina and made it the base for the jihad, the complete conquest and unification of the Arabian Peninsula.
Constantine burning Arian books, from a compendium of canon law, ca. 825
There is a pattern, monotheism was initially an instrument for the rapid imperial expansion. Later even Stalin figured this shtick, he had a blueprint. If you rule over the dispersed and conquered by force tribes with conflicting ethnic allegiances to their own gods and idols, a single ideology it’s not just a religion but a confirmation that a king is anointed (a moshiach) by the Creator himself. Hence a rebellion is a religious offence against the One God who shows no mercy.
The central shrine inevitably moves to the new capital – BeitHamikdash Temple in Jerusalem, Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and Masjid al-Haram in Mecca. The ruthless founding generals over time morph into the lyrical founding poets (in addition to the loot of the land, the illiterate warlords plunder the creative imagination of the nameless scribes).
Interestingly the most important theological controversy in Christianity was Arianism after the teaching of Arius of Alexandria (256-336 AD). Arius preached that Jesus was a man, not a God’s essence. The Bishops were doctrinally split when the Emperor Constantine hosted the Council of Nicaea in 325. The illiterate Emperor Constantine sided with the (meshichisten) bishops who maintained that the Jesus was God and in the Nicene Creed declared the Arianism a heresy. This was no accident, although Constantine formally only converted on his death-bed, he had his burial prepared far in advance. At the splendid Church of the Holy Apostles they entombed Constantine inside a lavish gold coffin surrounded by the symbolic twelve coffins representing the apostles of the Almighty God, with the Christ’s successor in the middle. Similarly both David and Muhammad are meta messianic. Had the Turks not destroyed the Byzantine civilization with the Christendom shifting back to the old Rome and to the Third Rome in Moscow, Constantine would have endured as the central meta myth as well.
From the beginning the imperial business (and later business of nation states) was war, slaughter and conquest. In the authoritarian states the monotheism evolved as the unifying ideology. The mortal, monarchical powers relied on monotheism to further the earthly grab, to nourish the thirsty souls, to bathe the senses in the cathartic rituals and to dance deliriously to the cruel, territorial drumbeat of One God and One Truth.
How can I compare Menachem Butler to Shmarya Rosenberg you ask? One is the obsessive librarian with a narrowly focused autistic range who carefully sources his every syllable, effectively making his output unreadable. Another is the obsessive grime hound who lives off DJing someone else’s music. In essence the dry dos and the slobbering DJ, both inhabit the derivative world, the dreaded quotation culture. And this explains why Shmarya is such a hit in the frum community. They sense intuitively that he is one of them. Compare someone who treats people in sublime, mythological terms with someone who is always expecting the worst in people, compare someone always ready to slap a vile headline with someone always projecting a lying sugar-coated myth, both equally deny a human being his or her humanity.
The Books and the Reviews
Wilhelm Stekel (in Swiss forest): "In reality, we are still children. We want to find a playmate for our thoughts and feelings."
So the books are not for reading, you say, instead find a review that suits your special prejudice and start spamming. You don’t even need to read the review, just the first two paragraphs to decide if the reviewer is on your side. This is also part and parcel of the derivative culture. After all, long after they obliterated authorship, it still doesn’t matter what the text says, it always about what a Rashi says. Forget the yapping commentators who never read a book, even if they did, they would have to ask their supervisor to explain what they just seen with their own eyes. Some high-ranking reputable hack needs to tell them what to think of it.
In turn I will hold my opinion till I read Wilhelm Stekel’s book (Conditions of Nervous Anxiety and Their Treatment). I bought one on eBay for $13 before the seller realized that he was holding more than just another out-of-print obscure psychology text. I also ordered two Wilhelm Stekel’s books from the library including his biography. But at least I will be looking for these clues:
There is a convincing claim that the Rabbiner described by Wilhelm Stekel is the Rashab.
There is the psychoanalytic narrative of the childhood sexual abuse and the life long struggle to deal with it.
Then the allegation that everyone overlooks, that Rashab became a soris (a castrato) after an illness. Let me just say that the Rabbi who was to “lead” the Russian Jews through the most challenging and deadly moment of the revolution, was allegedly carrying a malfunctioning apparatus (forgive the crudeness). It’s interesting because the Rayatz forbade his followers the operation (prostate?) that would render them a soris and the faithful followers suffered the immeasurable pain.
In addition the nonchalant dismissal of the sin of the Onon as if the Rayatz didn’t tell a childless couple that “tzulib kinder darf men zichmoisezain” (you have to sacrifice yourself for the children).
There is the far-reaching allegation that a known molester was free to roam the houses of the four Lubavitcher Rebbes.
There is the most interesting connection between the sexual trauma, the obsessions and the Rashab’s creative output.
People seem to forget that Tanya to Chabad is what Torah is to Jews. I have said for a while that Tanya is a fascist book, the Tzadik Rebbe description concocted by the Alter Rebbe is a fraud, a vile rant against the humanity, evidently the Rashab in a frank moment would agree with me (put that into your samechvov stockings).
Maya Balakirsky Katz and the Authorship
I received an email from Maya Balakirsky Katz with this telling sentence: “you are the only one of hundreds of emails I received with a full name and affiliation info – and hence the only one I’m responding to…” And this pretty much portrays the picture of the anonymous locust that swarms the space. Maya wrote: “I spent thousands of hours crafting that article almost two years ago”, and she deserves more that a midnight cut & paste with a hideous headline. In fact she deserves the gratitude for returning the Rashab to the holy brotherhood of the original authors who ride the creative wave of the homo-tormented sexuality. This is how Kabbalah was born in Spain and this is how any original line ever written seen the light of the blessed day. Looking forward to Maya’s book and looking forward to getting to know Wilhelm Stekel.
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On the subject of the Judaic Code as Microsoft Windows. In his book James Kugel points (page 513) to the usage of the two Persian words in Ecclesiastes – pardes (enclosed garden ) and pitgam (a royal decree). The Kohelet’s Hebrew is markedly different and might point to the writing or editing of the book full four centuries after the time of King Solomon, during the Persian invasion of Judah.
“Wikipedia, for instance, works on what I call the Oracle illusion, in which knowledge of the human authorship of a text is suppressed in order to give it superhuman validity. Traditional holy books work in precisely the same way and present the same problems.” (page 32)
With the traditional holy books the erasure of authorship gives you the extra benefit to reassign the authorship from the “ghost writers” for political or ideological reasons.
Behind the yawn inducing title and the forgettable graphics is the study comparable in scope to the work of the great Maimonides. Kugel covers the entire Tanach by looking at each event from the two divergent points of the view, the traditional interpretation and the contemporary reading by the biblical scholars. Each chapter in the book opens with a two-three sentence description of a biblical event. Then there is a paragraph or two where Kugel narrates the event in his own words. The key verses are quoted directly. You wouldn’t find a rashi or any late commentators in the “traditional” portion (except Kugel sometimes quotes Augustine). The author is only interested in how the text was understood or translated in the antiquity. Kugel selectively compares the text with the various apocrypha – Josephus, Philo, Pseudo-Philo (a Latin manuscript translation from the Greek that might have had a Hebrew origin and was at some point attributed to Philo), the Christian Gospels, the Arameic translations of Targum Onqelos, Targum Neophyti (never heard of this one), Targum Yonason, and finally the Medrash and the Talmud, etc.
Then Kugel looks at the text through the eyes of the last two centuries of the biblical criticism. This is a Rambam-like synthesis where Kugel tosses together different scholars and adds a distinct flavor with his own poetic and playful readings.
The Style
The monumental, momentous work is still an amazingly easy read. Kugel’s prose is sparse and clear. But the book upends the traditional images so radically that there is no way to zoom over the pages. Most people [Jews] have a visceral connection to these stories and characters. Suddenly you find in the attic a diary that opens your eyes to the members of own family. The experience is dramatic and traumatic. There is a review from a Catholic Priest on the Amazon to thank Kugel for helping in “understanding of the bible”. This reaction is only possible if you really don’t take the “Old Testament” too close to heart.
But savor the beauty and the logic. The unnerving view of the old family portraits from the perspective you never imagined. A door is opened to the entire new world. The intellectual elegance, the geshmak is real! But then you need to go outside, try to breathe, digest what you just heard about your own history and identity, walk around the block, day-dream the storm away.
The Chapter 7 – “God of Old”
I imagine this chapter is a condensed version of the book by the same name previously written by James Kugel. One of the most maddeningly fascinating parts of the How to Read the Bible are the changing “models” of the biblical God. The God of the Author P who wrote most of the Leviticus is different from the God of the Author D who wrote most of the Deuteronomy and yet not the same as the God of the Author J responsible for he better parts of the Genesis. But broadly there are two distinct Gods according to Kugel, the familiar, philosophically compliant, omnipresent God. This God didn’t fully “take shape” till the 6th century BCE at the end of the biblical period. And then there was the “God of Old” found in the Genesis. The Genesis God had a body, moved around and would appear to people as a regular stranger before they realized it was an angel or the God himself.
There is not a whiff of the Jewish esoteric tradition in the book. Not a single word about Kaballah or Chassdism although there are many humorous references to the American pop culture. I couldn’t help but think that the “God of Old” came for an encore during the Chassidic revolution (not to mention the Christianity or the Islam). This is also the old world model that Zalman Alpert describes as “Du, Tate!” Same “God of Old” makes an appearance in the greatest Jewish literary work by Der Nister in the eternal character of Sruli Gol. You want some holy “fog” Dr. Kugel? Der Nister got plenty of that!
The Impact
Someone asked Solzhenitsyn in the 70s what would happen if they publish The Gulag Archipelago in the Soviet Union? “The country will no longer exist” – answered Solzhenitsyn. Sadly the millenia of sacrifice comes tumbling down under the modest weight of James Kugel’s volume. All the challenges from the science, the mighty dinosaurs, the generations of skeptics and the blogs are simply not a match for the hypothesis of using the book itself, its internal logic to demolish the mythology from within. All the “criticism” pales in comparison to this approach. And Kugel does a devastating job with it.
After all what does it matter if the Chassidic revolution was imperfect or the challenge by Shmuel Munkes to the Alter Rebbe was incomplete? The colossal edifice has an irreparable flaw at the very core of the foundation. I recently heard Rebecca Goldstein that the protagonist in her last novel raises the tragic possibility of a talent sacrificed to a common ideology. But what if the real tragedy is the reversed, the entire nation sacrificed to several authors?
James Kugel work can be compared to Josephus, two thousand years later people still read Josephus. This is my prediction.
The Genius
Somehow Kugel’s orthodoxy looms large, naturally. But I feel differently about a genius. When there is a genuine breakthrough all to often the vehicle is just a screen, they are somehow separate. These are the strangers found in the Genesis ( Kugel’s “God of Old”) that go from a man to the God without lingering much at the angelic stopover. And this is deeper than the cold Anglo-Saxon “professionalism” that separates the inner life from the output (“his preferences is his own business” kind). I am talking about the raging creativity and curiosity that rides above and in spite of a human being, in other words it’s about the Rider.
The Personal
There are some conclusions in the book that took me years of the intense spiritual struggles. At least in two or three places I even noticed a language identical to my own. How did I manage to overlap with James Kugel for a decade in Boston and never meet or hear about him? The book of this magnitude was written somewhere within the three miles from here. But the reading made me feel optimistic, indeed it is worthy to live to witnesses the eruption.
The Postscriptum Rant
High on the irksome list of the Internet irritations are the indolent inscriptions about books, films or events, the inscriber never read, watched or attended. The opinions expressed based on comments to the blog posts about the fourth party mainstreamed reviews. To the same list belongs the Internet black hat magic moved by the linking mice, the quoting, the mash-up aggregation, the confusion between a content creation and the lucrative aftermath of the attention deficit disorder epidemic. The reaction to James Kugel’s book is the prime example that an absence of information never stopped anyone from having an opinion.
The next inevitable impasse is “why are people interested in James Kugel”? It seems axiomatic to say that people in general attenuate a person not the content, who is talking not what is being said. This tendency is culturally amplified, especially by the orthodox. The orthodoxy is a quotation culture that looks at ideas and innovation with suspicion and hostility and values above all a clever regurgitation of the narrowest slices in the autistic spectrum. In this cultural climate the emphasis is never on the content, none is expected really, but on the delivery. To be interested means to be transfixed by an inbred degenerate who is a great-grandson of some feudal overlord from a remote Carpathian village, a double in an off-off-beyond-the-pale production. So the real reason for the interest in James Kugel must be because he was seen wearing a tallis kotton with a crimson thread (a reference to Harvard not the blood of Jesus) or because a Jew has a visceral reaction to a certain type of the exasperatingly pun inducing soul food.
Enter the comparison brigade that wants to document why James Kugel’s hypothesis is different. I know nothing about the biblical criticism but if someone is aware of a book with a parallel breadth and depth please let me know ASAP, I will drop everything to dive in, or yet better, will go up the mountain to face it.
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There is an article in the Jerusalem post about the discovery of the two Shirat Hayam fragments from the same Sefer Torah scroll that is traced to the Cairo Geniza. One was purchased by a Baltimore collector in an auction in London and the second was purchased in Beirut.The scroll is dated to 5-7th centuries. The significance on the discovery, now on display in Israel, is that between the Qumran scrolls of the 2nd century and the Allepo Codex of the 10th century there are no known remaining Jewish manuscripts (I am not sure if this only refers to the Scripture or there are no any manuscripts remaining from that period). The article calls it“The Period of Great Silence”.
Just think about it, almost a thousand-year civilization with no trace of physical objects. No shoes, no buildings, no books, nothing… This is as if the millennia of Russia, that started only in the 10th century, had no trace except in people’s imagination and memory. But the good news is that Jews know with certainty about what happened for the millenia before the “The Great Silence”… (via bibleplaces)
“… woe onto our generation when the laymen have a clearer moral and epistemic common sense than the rabbanim, a generation that needs bloggers to show what is happening. Children teaching parents, young preaching to old is both comical and a source of pain.
…As I argued a few days ago, emunah in this context means the hope that in the future there will be a relief and deliverance from our theological dilemmas from some source or other; maybe not in every last detail but at least in broad outlines. We hope for a change in perspectives no different in magnitude than the Enlightenment and Modernity that will help us see clearly why our history is so uncanny, why we survived these many years, and what was the point of accepting torah and mitzvot.
Maybe a new Hegelianism, like the chasidisher vort, acharei mos, kedoshim emor…after the death of simple faith via the skepticism of Hume and Kant speak of holiness, that which belongs to the Spirit, i.e. Hegel. Hopefully we will be zocheh to have a Rav Kook, for our generation. It is not totally mad to believe there are alternatives to the Enlightenment and Modernity. Perhaps some new version of post modernism, perhaps some deeper understanding of virtual realities and the role of avatars.
We need not end up in a religious dystopia, ruled by power hungry ayatollahs where like the Stepford Wives we become brainwashed robots. Nor must we end up in a world of anarchy where Jewish life is destroyed. Relief and deliverance will come to the Jews both materially and spiritually. This is part of emuna…”
EJ, no ideology ever collapsed because of the philosophical or textual inconsistencies. All ideologies fall because of a moral crisis sometimes helped by an economic upheaval. The Russian revolution and the atheism triumphed because people no longer believed that a religion had a moral voice. The collusion between the clergy (Jewish and Christian) and money power enraged people to the point of complete rejection of the belief. This “revolutionary situation” was as old as Jesus himself. It’s the moral failing of the traditional Judaism that Jesus railed about. Even when he pushed the money changers from the Beis Hamikdosh. Similar situation exists today. In the face of the collusion between the Rabbinic class and the oligarchy Judaism lost its moral high ground, if it ever had any. But that’s a different post now…
XGH concludes there:
“…The point of the previous post was this: the fact that Biblical Studies (DH etc) was able to ask all sorts of questions that hadn’t been asked before in the Jewish world, and the fact that it is able to point out new interpretations and theories (even some non kefiradick ones), to the point that even fundies like Gil sit up and take notice and need to respond (albeit very lamely), yet these are just ‘academics’ whereas we’ve been learning the Torah in depth for three thousand years, yet we don’t really have good alternative answers to any of this (except to say they’re all just biased), tells you something. What does it tell you? Some people commented it tells you that the frum world doesn’t really care about the DH, or is just ignorant. While of course that’s true, that wasn’t my point at all. What it tells you is that 3,000 years of learning Torah in depth will only produce bogus ‘peshatim‘ if your fundamentally assumptions (e.g. Kugels 4 assumptions*) are entirely flawed. And that Gil’s beliefs that the traditional meforshim (and Chazal etc) got it all (or mostly) right (and were Gedolei Mesorah and Torah) is clearly bunk – and we have clear proof of that – 3,000 years of study produces incorrect results because the fundamental assumptions were entirely wrong, and some outsiders can come in armed with nothing much more than some different assumptions, and turn everything on its head. That process alone speaks volumes. And I was going to make that point explicitly, but then I thought it would be funnier to do it in a kind of chareidi style satire…”
*James Kugel’s four Biblical assumptions of the traditional interpretation. The Bible is:
James Kugel responded to the reviews of his book in the Jewish Quarterly and it’s starting to pick up the blogosphere buzz. Without the benefit of actually reading the JQR one can imperfectly gleam the objections from Kugel’s own polemic, specifically his virtual debate with Professor Benjamin Sommer.
James Kugel observes the conflict of a believer and a biblical scholar. On one hand one is compelled to accept the “four or more anonymous authors, all of whom lived long after the time of Moses”. On the hand there is a rhetoric to infuse the different authors with a divine origin and inspiration, as Kugel quotes Benjamin Sommer: “There is no contradiction between the austere God of P and the immanent God of J;there is no contradiction between the way P describes the miracle at the Reed Sea in a naturalistic way while J describes it in a supernatural way.”
James Kugel is basically saying that the search for the divine origin in Torah is a waste of time, it’s a hodgepodge. But then he proposes something even more radical: “These texts started out as one thing (etiological narratives, royal propaganda, divine instructions to the king, and cultic recitations) and then, thanks to the great Interpretive Revolution of the closing centuries BCE, they became something else entirely (moral tales, historical fact, timeless truths offered to all Israel, and the heartfelt psalms of King David).” To be sure Professor Kugel maintains there is a succession of the Interpretive Revolutions all the way to the Rabbinic Judaism. That process or re-imagining the texts is “divine” enough for James Kugel to the point of him basing his own Orthodoxy on this very proposition.
Is this argument not as contradictory that of Benjamin Sommer? In fact by the way of a pertinent detour there are letters that James Kugel published on this web site, comments about his book. Scroll in the middle there is a letter from some DH, Orthoprax or Orthodox, read it. Can James Kugel accuse anyone of being conflicted, inconsistent or contradictory?
But let me mine some value here. All these scholars don’t care about the truth, they toss in just enough demagoguery to explain the conflicts of their dubious practices and the tribal standings. But yet there is some geshmak to be found in their own unrestrained “interpretive revolutions”, firm and toned mental gymnastics, like this one:
“Let’s look at the one case that Sommer does examine in detail, the insertion of the Judah-Tamar episode in the middle of the Joseph story. Both narratives, Judah-Tamar and at least some parts of the Joseph story, come from “J.” Sommer notes – so obviously they were meant to go together (p. 160). I suppose that argument would have more force if “J” were indeed one person. But nobody (except possibly the late Gerhard von Rad) really maintains that – indeed, the whole Tendenz of recent European Pentateuchal studies has been, to quote the title of a 2006 collection of essays, A Farewell to the Yahwist. Even Wellhausen insisted that “J” was really a collection of different writers, J1, J2, J3, and so forth, and Rolf Rendtorff, H. H. Schmid and others subsequently made the same case in great detail. So drop that argument – it was false to begin with. And come to think of it, why shouldn’t Sommer want to consider the Judah-Tamar episode an interpolation?
Surely he subscribes to some form of the Documentary Hypothesis, nor, therefore, does he likely have any objection in principle to identifying Judah-Tamar as an interpolation.
What is more, this episode clearly announces itself as such, starting as it does with that all-purpose editorial transition, “At this same time…” and ending with a staple of nearly all insertions, the resumptive repetition (Wiederaufnahme), found here in Gen. 39:1, “Now [as I was saying,] Joseph had been brought down to Egypt.” The Judah-Tamar narrative further identifies itself as an interpolation by its disjunction from the surrounding story of Joseph, most notably in its picture of Judah, who is here an at least middle-aged paterfamilias with three grown sons, indeed, a grandfather by the end of the story, whereas much later in the Joseph story, Reuben, the oldest brother, can say to his father, “You may kill my two sons if I do not bring him [Benjamin] back to you” (Gen. 42:37). It certainly sounds as if he is talking about two minor children, not mature adults with a will of their own. If so, how can Reuben’s younger brother Judah have been the father of grown, married sons still earlier? (Not impossible, surely, but a rather unlikely detail for the unitary author “J” to have stuck in.) The Judah of the Judah-Tamar episode also seems to be a rather different character from the Judah who appears in the chapters that follow it. The former is a loutish bully who is prepared to condemn his daughter-in-law to death despite the reasonable inference that it was his own cruel prevention of her marrying that led her in desperation to an extramarital pregnancy. By contrast, the Judah of the Joseph story is the moral hero of the entire affair, a man prepared to sacrifice his own welfare in order to allow his brother Benjamin to go free. As many have argued, the only reason for Judah-Tamar’s insertion into the Joseph narrative was that it preserved an ancient tradition concerning the ancestry of two allegedly Judahite clans, Perez and Zerah. And if it was inserted where it was, this was simply because there was no other place to put it: it could not come after the Joseph story, at the end of which Judah and his brothers have all immigrated to Egypt, because the events of Judah-Tamar takes place when Judah is still living in the land of Israel; and to put the story before the Joseph narrative would only compound the problem of Judah’s middle-aged persona in Judah-Tamar. It had to be inserted somewhere in the middle.”
It would be nice to farbreng one day with all the Js, the original bloggers. You see the anonymity is the root cause of all the evil in the world. If they signed their darn “trees of life” the world would have been different, better.
P.S. Wait, what’s going down here? So the reason for the insertion of the Judah-Tamar story was the need to establish the Judean family tree of non other than the future (or is it past?) King David himself and by extension every serious messianic contender known to man and the only thing they came up with is the incestuous, random fling with a whore? Wow! Even if this was true, given the editorial control, they would have kept it all in the family rather than deliberately mess up the story line?
Here what really happen. Some nerd going by the name J7 was sitting doing what he or she usually does on a Thursday afternoon, writing Humash that is. Suddenly several Judean rich goons showed up to make sure J7 spins something nice about their families. It was then that J7 remembered when his was a kid schlepping around his scrolls, the bullies would kick him, spill his ink and draw obscene pictures on the back of his scrolls. Now was his chance to get even. J7 wrote the worst lurid tale he can think of, knowing too well that the illiterate shepherds from the Perez and Zerah families would never find out. And the rest like they say is history.
Hanoch Daum is really most qualified to speak on this subject and he immediately points to the crux of the matter. Motti Elon is not just a charismatic leader or a great “communicator”. He is the Rebbe of the entire religious zionist movement. This is not some shmendrik named Leib Tropper that everyone knew was a creep even before the tapes. Just look at the YouTubes of Motti Elon, they don’t call this a “tish” for nothing. But do read Hanoch Daum’s article: Rabbi Elon affair shows that adoration of rabbis needs to be reassessed.
Remarkable René Braginsky Manuscript Collection is now available online. These pages are from the 13th century Abraham Abulafia’s “Sefer Hashem”. One can see that the art of gematria practiced by Abraham Abulafia was called after the Greek geometria for reason evident in this book.
In describing ‘Hayey haolam haba’ [this sefer], one of the principal works of R. Abraham Abulafia, the noted mystic R. Hayyim Joseph David Azulai (1724-1807), better known as the Hid”a, wrote:
“This is a book written by R. Abraham Abulafia, concerning the circle of the seventy-two letter [Divine] Name, which I saw on the manuscript parchment. And know that the Raba [R. Solomon ben Adret] in his Responsa, sec. 548,2 and Rabbi YaSar [R. Joseph Solomon del Medigo of Candia], in Sefer Mesdref le-Hokmdh, expressed contempt toward him as one of the worthless people, or worse. However, I say that in truth I see him as a great rabbi, among the masters of secrets, and his name is great in Israel, and none may alter his words, for he is close to that book mentioned, and his right hand shall save him.”
These remarks of the Hid “a aptly summarize the problem involved in Abulafia’s thought and his role in the development of the Kabbalah. To begin with, despite his greatness as a mystic, being “among the masters of secrets,” he was fiercely attacked by the major halakhic figure of his generation, R. Solomon ben Abraham ibn Adret, and was placed under the ban. It follows from this that R. Azulai’s words, “as one of the worthless people, or worse,” were a deliberate understatement, intended to safeguard the honor of both Abulafia and his critics. The fact that ‘Hayyey haolam haba’ remained in manuscript form until the eighteenth century would suggest that the effect of Rasba’s ban had not worn off even then, or for that matter until our own day. Nevertheless, it seems to me that, between the final years of the thirteenth century, when Abulafia was excommunicated by his opponent in Barcelona, and the seventeenth century, a striking change occurred in the status of the banned Kabbalist.
A figure such as R. Azulai (Hid”a), who was expert in all dimensions of Jewish culture and who at the same time represented post-Sabbatian Kabbalistic thought in the East, did not hesitate to praise the man and to describe his system in glowing terms: “his name is great in Israel, and none may alter his words.” Such a drastic change-from excommunication to a position in the foremost ranks of Jewish mystics-is indicative of an unprecedented phenomenon in the development of Jewish mysticism.”
It’s a shame that Chassidim who nominally were called upon to uphold this teaching did their best to obfuscate this heroic spiritual legacy. In fact the entire Chabad Chasidus is nothing but an evil attempt to conceal the teaching behind an elaborate, populist smokescreen.
Marc Chagall, Apocalypse in Lilac: Capriccio, 1945
NYT – Small Museum Captures a Rare Chagall. Chagall made the sketch while in New York in 1945. The paper writes that this is a “gouache” although it looks like a watercolor. The drawing will be displayed for the first time in Ben Uri Gallery AKA The London Jewish Museum of Art. The name of the painting is a translation from Chagall’s own Russian inscription (wonder what it is in the original).
There is a ubiquitous for Chagall shtetl on the right, a cow, a fiddler, his trademark flying, till death do us part, lovers plus a Sefer Torah. And the falling clock. The crucifixion itself is equally offensive to both religions, but who is counting. The naked Jesus Chris is wearing a Tallis and Tefillin, might be annoying for the remaining Jews. The Christians on the other hand are used to the iconic naked depictions of the Christ but certainly not with the obviously female lower body (probably bleeding). As the Trinity is Kabbalistically recast into “The Father, The Son and The Holy Mother”.
This is the self described bio that was on Leib Tropper’s web site before the site was taken down yesterday:
“Rabbi Leib Tropper, Rosh Yeshiva of Kol Yaakov Torah Center, was born on the Lower East Side to Rav Yehuda Tropper, a popular mechanech at Yeshivas Rabbeinu Yaakov Yosef Elementary School, and Rivka o”h, the daughter of the Valbolneker Iluy, HaGaon HaRav Leib Forer zt”l. After graduating from Yeshivas Rabbeinu Yaakov Yosef at the age of 12 ½, Rabbi Tropper first attended the Yeshiva of Philadelphia and then learned at the Telshe Yeshiva in Cleveland. Before reaching his 15th birthday, Rabbi Tropper traveled to Eretz Yisroel to learn in Yeshivas Torah Ore, founded by Maran Harav Chaim Pinchus Scheinberg shlit”a. Rabbi Tropper spent more than five years at Yeshivas Torah Ore, where he developed a close relationship as a talmid, receiving most of his hadracha from the Rosh Yeshiva shlita.
After leaving Torah Ore, Rabbi Tropper accepted a position at the world renowned Ohr Sameach institutions, then still in its embryonic stages. During that period, Rabbi Tropper accumulated four semichos, the first being from Hagaon Harav Sroyohu Deblitzky shlita, a talmid muvhak of the Chazon Ish zt”l. Subsequently, he received ordination from then Sephardic Chief Rabbi, Rav Ovadia Yosef shlita. However, his most precious semichos were those received from the Mara D’asra of Yerushalayim, Harav Betzalel Zolty and Maran Harav Elazar Menachem Man Shach zt”l, the Ponevezher Rosh Yeshiva.
After five years in Yerushalayim teaching baalei teshuva, Rabbi Tropper returned to the United States to become the educational director of Ohr Sameach, New York located in Yonkers and Monsey. After several years he was encouraged to start a new yeshiva for baalei teshuva who wish to become B’nei Torah and be mainstreamed into a conventional yeshiva environment. Kol Yaakov’s doors opened in Elul of ’81 and was named in honor of Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetsky zt”l, who inspired its founding. In existence for almost 25 years, Kol Yaakov has reached students from across the globe. Rabbi Tropper attributes the yeshiva’s success to the approach in Hashkafa and Chinuch he learned from his Rosh Yeshiva, Maran Harav Scheinberg shlita.
In 1990, Rabbi Tropper began a new outreach program called Horizons, focusing on educating and inspiring the unaffiliated to experience a Torah lifestyle. As its director, Rabbi Tropper has traveled across the world to places such as Berlin, London, Paris among others and visited remote cities throughout the U.S. lecturing and teaching. Additionally, he has also authored three seforim, the first of which was published at the age of 21 which incorporated many of the psakim of Harav Eliyashuv, shlita and received approbations from numerous Gedolim including Harav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, zt’l and Harav Henkin, zt’l. Another of his Halachic sfarim is based on the p’sokim of his Rebbe, Maran Harav Scheinberg, shlit”a and the third based on halachic decisions of Rav Tuvia Goldstein zt’l.
Rabbi Tropper studied Halacha under the direction of Gedolei Horoah such as, Harav Sheinberg, Harav Tuvia Goldstein and had the special opportunity to learn with Harav Henkin, zt’l.”
